London Letter
E. Buxton Shanks
London, September 29th.
Enoughof war poetry. An industrious statistician has calculated that three thousand pieces have been printed since the beginning of August. When our poets are unanimous in the choice of a subject, their unanimity is horrible. We have had lyrical outrages from railway porters, dairymen, postmen, road scavengers, and what not, with their names and professions duly appended, in the delectable fashion set some time ago byThe English Review. Meanwhile, in France, young poets are killing one another. We must arrange a balance-sheet of gains and losses when the war is done. M. Charles Péguy is gone already; that is a loss which makes one fear for Jules Romains and the rest who must be at the front in one army or the other. The French and German casualty lists are not published in the English papers: when the smoke clears off again the arts of the continent will show a different complexion.
Meanwhile we are beginning to ask, prematurely of course, what effect the war will have indirectly on our own arts. The war of ’70 caused an epoch of literary ferment in Germany and was at the back of much good poetry. To that war we owe Detter von Liliencron, Richard Dehmel, and Gerhart Hauptmann, who is, I freely admit, a great dramatist, though I cannot abide him. In France it produced the tired subtleties of Kahn, Régnier, and the other Symbolists. In Austria, a century of humiliation, which has become almost a national habit, has evolved the tired elegance of Hofmannsthal and the weary tenderness of Schnitzler who is so obviously so sorry for all his characters as almost to make the reader weep with him. If we win this war, what may we expect? We can be certain that the English arts will react to the strain: the reaction will not necessarily be a good one, unless the efforts of those who sit about at home and vulgarize war are neutralized or ignored. The tone of our newspapers—and these mould our minds, whether we like it or not—is now most insufferably ugly. And as a result of victory, I fear a blatant hollow tone of exultation in our poetry that—from a literary and social standpoint—is almost worse than the languors of defeat. It will be well if we achieve victory when every person in the country has been made to feel the cost of it. Three days knee-deep in flooded trenches—our arts must draw strength from that dreadful experience.
It is true perhaps that we do wish to feel the cost. We are supposed to live in fear of a Zeppelin raid. In my opinion, half the inhabitants of London constantly though secretly hope it. We feel that with a bomb or two tumbling about our heads we shall be “in it.” To read the newspapers islike having a surfeit of the kind of book which is called “The Great War of 19—.” I have read dozens of them and they move my imagination almost as much as the reports—some of them, such as are well-written, like Mr. Wells’sWar in the Air, even more.
The result that we must pray for is a greater concreteness and reality in our writing. We have developed an inhuman literary point of view which is fundamentally insincere and which is never more ugly or less convincing than when our poets try to be “modern.” Such poets as Emile Verhaeren—now a refugee in London—treat factories and so forth, the typical products, they think, of modern life, purely as romantic apparitions, much as the romantic writers treated mountains and deserts, excuses for rhetoric and flamboyant description. They have never felt the reality of them, because modern life in its rapidity has outdistanced the poet’s mind in his attempt to conceive it.
I hold no brief for “modern poetry” in that sort of sense: I do not hold it necessary to write about these things. But if you will compose upon a factory or a railway-station, you must feel what factories and railway-stations really are; you must not take refuge in a romantic description of lights and roaring machinery. The perpetually breaking high note of the Futurists is merely a rather useless attempt to deal with a difficulty that we all know. Perhaps the war will bring us rather suddenly and jarringly in touch with reality. It is certain that the young men of the class from which literature chiefly comes, have now in their minds a fixed and permanent thought which from time to time comes up onto the surface of consciousness. This thought is the thought of violent death. We have grown physically and morally soft in security; but, as I write, affairs are reaching a crisis in France, fresh regiments are being sent abroad. We each of us wonder which may be the next to go.
This honest and undisguised fear—a man is wonderfully insensitive if he does not feel it and a braggart if he will not admit it—has a powerful and purifying effect on the spirit. Its spiritual action is comparable to that of violent and maintained physical exercise. The flabby weight of our emotions is being reduced and hardened: we have sweated away a great many sick fancies and superfluous notions. The severe pressure of training for war induces in us a love of reason, a taste for hard thinking and exactitude and a capacity for discipline.
The art of war is fortunately an art that allows itself to be definitely judged. Either you win your battles or you lose them. It is of no use to say that Warmser was a great general whose subtle and esoteric methods of making war have never been appreciated by a numskulled public. Napoleon thrashed him and there is an end of argument. A soldier cannot resignedly appeal from the fortunes of the field to the arbitrament of the future.
The consideration of these facts leads us to wish that poetry were in thesame case; and we are beginning to feel both that poetry may become a more active factor in normal life than hitherto and that a careful criticism may remove it from the desert space of assertion and undefended preference which it now inhabits. Possibly the war may help to cure us of our ancient English muddle-headedness. We have awakened with surprise to find our army an admirable and workmanlike machine. The South African war rid us, in military affairs, of the incompetent amateur and the obstructive official. Vague rumors of what the army had learnt there even reached other departments of activity: possibly this war will infect us all with a new energy and a new sense of reality. We may learn how to reach our ends by taking thought and by cherishing ideas instead of plunging on in a sublimely obstinate and indisciplined muddle. As for our war-poetry—I must end where I began—it is merely a sloughing of the old skin, a last discharge of the old disease.